John - I thought your summary and conclusion reached a thoughtfully reflective terminus to your ponderings on ‘the new creation’. I wondered whether some consideration of the ‘new heaven and new earth’ - Revelation 21:1 would also be appropriate, as the destiny for which those participating in God’s ‘new creation’ now are heading.

Despite your protests in a previous post, I still think that one of your central preoccupations is the issue of ‘inside/outside’ or ‘them versus us’ in ‘the new creation’. I appreciate your desire, which you share with many today, to urge an understanding of the Christian faith in which the main focus is not who is in and who is out, but how the Christian faith, or ‘the new creation’, can benefit others.

My only difficulty with the way you have developed this line of thinking, whilst sharing fully the generous intentions which motivate it, is that it leads back, in a rather circular way, to the original ‘inside/outside’ problem it was seeking to circumvent. How can the Christian faith, or ‘the new creation’, benefit the world at large? Crucially, by inviting people to share in it. It is ‘in Christ’ that barriers of race, gender, oppression, are overcome. The ‘new earth’, which is the home of the ‘new creation’, is intended to be the home of those who have already made their home with the Christ who will inaugurate it.

Where I wish to fully agree with your overall argument, however, is that the church as we know it has probably tended to create boundary lines between itself and the rest of the world where they were never intended to be. Indeed, the church has created some of the strongest boundary lines between different factions of itself - Protestant/Catholic, Reformed/Pentecostal, Modern/Postmodern etc. While the church has often claimed exclusive proprietorial rights to Christ, and particular cultural expressions of him (for cultural is too often what it really is), Christ himself has quietly turned up somewhere else, not least among people who otherwise had no knowledge of him.

In this sense, the church itself has often created a false sacred/secular, them/us divide. The boundaries where God has created them are indeed permeable. The new creation was intended for the good of all humanity, not something that the church was intended to preserve for itself. Breaking down divisions was at the heart of this project, in a God whose very essence was love for the entire world.

So there is a ‘generous orthodoxy’. But at the heart of it is a God who chose to express this ‘orthodoxy’ in astonishingly particular ways:

He chose a particular people, Israel, and then the church, in which his purposes should find expression - rather than doing it through all nations equally

He chose to bring his purposes to light through one agent, not through a collection of agents who were distributed equally through all nations and cultures

He invited people everywhere to put their trust in this one representative of himself as a precondition of participation in the people of God as they were to be - not through a democratically fair and equal distribution of representatives throughout the world

There was one cross through which the death of the old creation was proclaimed, and one resurrection through which the new creation was demonstrated to have come about - not an assemblage of deaths and resurrections to all nations, cultures and people-groups

The boundary line became the visible expression of the eschatological Spirit on all those who put their trust this one representative of God, replacing through faith and Spirit in a worldwide context the previous boundary lines of law and Torah observance.

However, the generous intentions of this particular way of bringing things about are evident in the whole story of the people of God. It is with that generous intention that I find myself standing on common ground with yourself, in contrast with any who would seek to preserve the purity of what they believe by focusing on their separation from those who do not dot the same i’s or cross the same t’s as themselves.